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After Wordpress is installed, there are a few settings which can be changed to make your website work the way you want. Below is a checklist with links to explanations and how-to’s. You will need to be logged into the Wordpress dashboard at http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/
While making these changes, it is a good idea to regularly check the public view of the website to make sure it looks correct. If something doesn’t look right, go back into the Wordpress Admin Dashboard and reverse your changes.
Users - in Dashboard, click on Users, Add New and fill out details for the users who will be publishing on the website. The User Roles which come with Wordpress are further explained on the Definitions page. Generally Editor, Author and Subscriber are most commonly used. You can also upload images for each of the Users
Settings, General – fill out the details and click Save Changes at the bottom
- Website title (appears in top blue bar of browser when looking at the site)
- tagline – a line of text which appears just under the site name in most Wordpress themes
- allow anyone to register for the site (so people can subscribe to make comments) and what their role should be (recommend leaving this as subscriber)
- timezone – so that posts show the correct time of publication
- date & time formats and choose the day which starts a week
Settings, Writing – fill out the details and click Save Changes at the bottom
- Most of these settings can stay as selected, however i do like to change the Default Post Category to something more meaningful than “Uncategorized” where possible. Before you do this you will need to open a new screen to add categories to Wordpress.
- Once you have new categories created, go back to Settings, Writing and choose you default category, this means all new posts will automatically have this category but you can select additional categories at the time you write a post.
Settings, Reading – fill out the details and click Save Changes at the bottom
- Again, keeping the defaults for most of these settings is a great way to get started, but it is worth noting that this is where you can set the look of your website homepage to be different than the most recent posts, for example if you would like the fromntpage of the website to always show a specific page like “About Us” this is where you set it
- you can also control the number of posts to be shown here, which is worth looking at once you have more than 10 posts done to your website
Settings, Discussion – fill out the details and click Save Changes at the bottom
These settings control the comments area of your website, and it is worth making a few adjustments to reduce spam to your site if you have allowed comments. We will also be using the Akismet plugin to help reduce spam.
Keep all of the defaults and additionally:
- Turn on Users must be registered and logged in to comment
- Turn on Enable threaded (nested) comments
- Turn off Comment author must have a previously approved comment
If you want to comments on your website, then turn off Allow people to post comments on the article
Settings, Privacy & Settings, Media – most people won’t need to make any changes here unless they have special requirements – these pages provide some control of whether you want your site to be listed on Search Engine Result Pages and standard image sizes within posts. After using your site for a while you may want to adjust the latter, but generally these don’t need changing.
Settings, Permalinks – fill out the details and click Save Changes at the bottom
This page controls the website URLs or addresses. By default Wordpress pages & posts have names like http://www.yoursitename.com/?p=123 which is not very useful or friendly. To make the addresses friendlier you can choose any of the other options or create your own custom structure. I like to set this to Custom and put /%postname%/ in the box, this will make your addresses look like http://www.yoursitename.com/yourposttitle/ which is much friendlier and has many advantages when people are searching for information via search engines. I prefer to leave the optional fields blank.
Settings, Miscellaneous – most people won’t need to make any changes here unless they have special requirements
Posts, Categories – once set up Categories provide a simple way to classify and navigate around your website watch a video about Categories & Tags here
I think thats enough information to get you Wordpress website set up. However if anything isn’t clear, please put a comment below and I will be more than happy to help out.
Happy Blogging!
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